Elizabeth Barnes’s Health Problems, like all of her works, is an almost overwhelmingly rich read, densely packed with tight arguments, conceptual distinctions, evocative examples, and jokes. Barnes’s signature brand in academia is to do maximally rigorous metaphysics about the things that matter most to us without losing their texture, complexity, or realism in the name of precision; this book decidedly helps to build that brand.
Barnes’s central claim is that health is ineliminably metaphysically messy. There is, at bottom, no determinate single thing that it is. Not only does the concept of health do different work in different contexts and serve different interests, but often we ask the concept to do inherently tension-ridden things. Pluralist theories of health have become popular lately,1 but Barnes goes farther, arguing that not only does “health” mean multiple things but each of these things is itself indeterminate and unstable. Always the metaphysical...
